Can the wisdom of a WISE crowd avoid artless creativity?

In the last six years, the World Innovation Summit in Education, held annually in Doha, has grown into a giant amongst education events, bringing teachers, innovators and other edu-geeks together to discuss, share and provoke practice. Whilst concerned with all aspects of the global education agenda, WISE’s focus remains on the power of innovation in education, and the need to develop broader outcomes in young people.

When a journalist interviewing me at the summit asked the inevitable ‘why Qatar?’ question, my response was that this kind of gathering was needed, partly as a counter to more traditional corporate and governmental convening power of the so-called ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ (or GERM). I didn’t mind who met this need, as long as they met it well. WISE, established by the Qatar Foundation, has become an important, risk-taking player in the global education landscape. As Ralph Tabberer, former Director General of Schools for the DfE, and now boss of Better, Broader, Deeper Education, summed up: ‘A very diverse set of people. Not overwhelmed by the West. Lots of networking, Fewer government people so it was all more applied.’ The Learners’ Voice programme is a key cog in the WISE machine, ensuring that the views of young people are embedded throughout the summit.

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Create, Imagine, Learn’. I was asked to join a panel discussion on teachers and creativity, a good opportunity to shout about some of the ideas we pitched in Licensed to Create, our new animation and publication which launched last week. My starting point was an argument that the creativity of any education system cannot surpass the creativity of its teachers, but I tried to make the rest of my thoughts outcomes-neutral. Even if you believe in many of the current assessment-reinforced orthodoxies about what our children should learn, or that teaching pupils to be creative is a waste of time, I still think there is a case to nurture the creativity of our teachers.

You can find most of my ideas in our animation, but I came away from the panel with a few other thoughts.

First, from conversations with people from numerous nations, I am even more convinced that democratic curriculum design has a central role to play. Governments need to create and protect spaces outside of the national curriculum for teachers to develop their own curriculum, in partnership with their pupils, parents and local community and employers, that meets their needs and interests. Our Grand Curriculum Designs programme aims to give teachers the skills to do just this.

Second, I was surrounded at WISE by fantastic people offering inspiring programmes. Although there were teachers and policymakers here, the conference was dominated by education do-gooders, in the best possible sense – whilst not leading schools, they were making creative things happen for young people in schools. My question for them was what happens when your circuses leave town? Projects working in schools need to avoid being surrogate innovators, and should aim to build rather than replace teachers’ capacity for innovation. This is difficult to achieve, as under-pressure teachers often deliberately seek out off-the-shelf innovations. But all of us who work with schools and teachers should ask serious questions about whether, in the understandable quest to make things easy for teachers, we are removing opportunities to foster innovative capacity.

Third, one fellow panel member was particularly brutal about current education systems. I always find the pathologising of schools and teachers in events such as these uncomfortable and unconstructive. No, schools are not exam factories, they have changed since industrial times, and they don’t kill creativity. Our starting point for any conversation should be to honour the millions of teachers around the world that, at any given moment, despite the constraints put upon them and the numerous reasons not to do so, are continuously finding new ways to inspire their pupils and enable them to have and realise great ideas.

My other least favourite creativity-riff, heard more than once at WISE, is the ‘schools are preparing young people for jobs that do not exist yet’ line, trotted out by edu-quacks around the world, often accompanied by spurious statistics (as if this could ever be quantified). Not only is it nonsense, even if it were true its implications for schools and colleges would be vacuous. It implies that somehow most school education is already too vocational, gearing people towards a particular career path. This is rarely true. As our report on Suffolk asserted, young people need a ‘deeper, earlier and more negotiated engagement with the world of work’, a generalist approach to discovering your possible vocation or set of vocations.

Overall, The wisdom of a WISE crowd outweighed these minor frustrations above. The quality of presentations was high, with a carefully curated range of inputs and workshops, one highlight a humble and humbling speech from Wise Prize for Education Laureate Ann Cotton from CamFed. Like so many similar initiatives, WISE tries and struggles to maintain interaction with participants between the annual events, but that says more about the rest of us than about WISE.

One surprise was that, in a conference on creativity, there was so little focus on the role of arts and culture. This may partly be due to fear of creativity sticking in the traditional tramlines of the arts – people are so desperate to prove that creativity can be nurtured in any domain, they ignore the arts. However, there may be something else at play here. At the conference, NESTA's Geoff Mulgan claimed that ‘creativity has to be useful’, but in using creative accounting and creative dictatorship as examples, he confused utility with morality.

Perhaps, in the quest to ensure that we focus on useful creativity, or the ‘applied creativity’ of innovation, we inevitably reduce and relegate the role of the arts. In one sense, the arts are at their very heart useless. Once an artistic creation becomes useful in a practical sense, it’s a craft – function has trumped form. Art has no utility beyond its ability to provoke emotion in its audience. This, of course, is deeply useful to our individual and collective lives, but is likely to be neglected from excessively utilitarian concepts of creativity.

It took a Frenchman, Jacques Lang, to remind conference delegates of the importance of cultural learning. Hanif Kureishi once wrote that ‘ambition without imagination can feel clumsy’ (he could have been talking about any number of current or recent political leaders). Similarly, creativity without culture can feel artless. My suggestion for WISE 2015 would be a focus on cultural education in its broadest sense, including intercultural dialogue and understanding, but discussing how all education institutions and systems, developed and developing, can place far greater emphasis on arts and cultural learning.

Joe Hallgarten is Director of Education at the RSA. Follow him @joehallg